Five Mile Rapids, French River - High Water In Late Summer

Description

Five Mile Rapids is the most concentrated stretch of rapids on the French River, Ontario, Canada. This video was filmed when we travelled down this section of the French River in high water levels. It was late summer going into early fall but the summer had been very wet and there was a lot of water flowing down the various channels of the French, which is quite a complex system of waterways. The river is also important from an historical perspective, particularly during the fur trade. The French River was the first river to be designated a Canadian Heritage River, in 1986. The Five Mile Rapids section is an absolute classic of canoe travel in this part of the Canadian Shield.

The French river flows 105 km from Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay but drops only 19 metres along its entire length. Flowing out of the middle French, which is more like a lake with islands, than a river, the main channel of the French River starts with Little Pine Rapids, which also marks the beginning of the Five Mile Rapids stretch. This is followed by Big Pine Rapids, Double Rapids, Blue Chute, Big Parisien Rapids, Devil Chute, Little Parisien Rapids then, a little further down, Crooked Rapids. The latter marks the end of the Five Mile Rapids run. After this it's flat all the way down to Dry Pine Bay.

We canoed this section of the river as part of the Eighteen Mile Island Loop, which links a downstream journed on the main channel, a.k.a. the south channel or Voyageur channel, with an upstream journey on the north channel. You can start at Dry Pine Bay or at Wolseley Bay, completing the loop and ending back where you started. This is a really nice canoe-camping trip, which you can easily do in a long weekend.

If you'd like to see more of the whole journey that the video above is taken from, then you can check out my article via the link below, which has lots of useful info on the route, camping, canoe hire, accommodation, etc.

http://paulkirtley.co.uk/2017/french-river-eighteen-mile-island-loop/

Tags: French River,Five Mile Rapids,Ontario,Canada,canoe,canoeing,white water,rapids,Big Pine Rapids,Little Pine Rapids,Blue Chute,Big Parisien Rapids,Little Parisien Rapids,Devil Chute,Crooked Rapids,Double Rapids,French River main channel,French River Provincial Park,Paul Kirtley,canoe trip,canoe camping,expedition canoeing,Novacraft,tandem canoe,canoe tripping,canadian canoe

Video Transcription

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the French River is north of the Great Lakes and it is a canoe route of historic importance it flows southwards from Lake Nipissing to the top of Georgian Bay and as such it was an important link joining routes taking in the otter and mattarah rivers down into the Upper Great Lakes used by First Nations and then explorers and voyagers during the fur trade and when you paddle here there's always a sense of great history that you are joining the ranks of people who have explored and made Canada what it is today now the French River only drops 19 meters over it's 105 kilometer length and the most concentrated section of whitewater is the five mile Rapids section which this video focuses on it has six or seven significant sets of Rapids more or less significant depending on the water level but it flows from where the red dot is here down towards the bottom of the map and those Rapids having names such as Big Pine rapid and blue chutes and big Parisien Rapids and crooked Rapids certainly conjure up images in your mind when you're looking at the map of this area the other thing you'll notice when studying the topography of this area is it is a complex landscape the French River is not a single channel a river it is a complex set of interlinking channels lakes and waterways that give endless opportunities for exploration but the main Voyager route was down the main channel and through the five mile Rapids section

first up in the five mile Rapids section is little pine Rapids and at this water level a very straightforward piece of moving water to negotiate an easy start to this classic section of river there but this wide and really quite deep channel is somewhat deceptive there's a good amount of water flowing down here and particularly for this time of year there was a lot of water there was a wet summer in this part of Canada in 2017 and the water levels for September were a lot higher than normal and you get some idea of the volume of water when we hit these boilie sections where we're being pushed around and you can see water bubbling up from the depths coming up next was Big Pine Rapids and this is a more significant set of Rapids and one that requires some care now the observant among you will no doubt notice that this section is the one that featured on the front of Ray Goodwin's canoeing book the second edition with yours truly paddling through the mist early morning after camping below that area with clients on a trip in 2012 so this is an area I've been to multiple times before and unlike that photograph on the front of Ray's book when the water levels again at this time of year were normally quite low now they were quite high and we needed to land and check out what was going on with Big Pine even at this water level it's quite an awkward rocky entrance to this area what follows is not necessarily straightforward and you have to get the line right to avoid what's quite a large stopper or hydraulic at this water level and then there's some good-sized standing waves as well which can swamp a boat if you don't get it right so while I'd be happy to negotiate this area with a solo boat empty with a tandem boat loaded with gear it was easier and certainly less risky just to line the boat now some people turn their nose up but lining they don't enjoy doing it but for me it's part and parcel of the skill set that you need to travel in places like this [Music]

with Big Pine Rapids successfully and safely negotiated we were then heading on down towards double rapids which at lower water levels is nothing more than a double chute of water that's easy enough to paddle but at this water level it was completely washed out there were no Rapids there whatsoever hence my comments in the introduction to this the number of significant Rapids varies depending on water levels next up blue chute blue chute is another iconic rapid of the French River and it's a little bit hard to inspect from the river it sits right

after a bend where the river constricts and because of this constriction you get this malevolent looking tongue of water coming down into a pretty big wave train certainly at this water level it's not technically difficult but the potential force whomping certainly in the waves is real so you choose your line I would say a little bit to the right of this and make sure that you don't swamp your boat we'll see anyway we parked up and we inspected the river got back in our boat and here we go you'll see in a second though how the water really picks up speed as it constricts and drops over the lip and down into blue chute and you can see it taking our boat it just effectively sucks the boat down the rapid it's a good fun rapid to run though

only a little bit of bailing required and then we were on our way and once you threw blue shoot you down into this gorgeous section running down towards big Parisian Rapids [Music]

as you can see the water was quite oily here again with water squeezing up from lower down moving around in interesting ways and we were getting quite close to the top of big Parisian so we just took a moment to Eddy out and have a look what I was struggling with at this point was trying to see where we could land to have a look at the rapids because there are a number of channels here and at this water level there's a few of them flowing

it appeared that there was somewhere that we could land of course there is a portage trail here but what I wanted was somewhere where we could land and actually see what was going on in the rapids and as we travel along here you can see that there's a side channel with water flowing down it that's to the right of the actual Rapids we want to inspect so getting a good close look at the rapid we might run is not so easy at this water level [Music]

in fact we were able to get a good view of the entry into the area and then get down towards the end of the rapids and look back up and have a look at this wave train in particular I know from having run these Rapids at lower water levels that there is a certain amount of rock which sticks out on the left-hand side of the river which is causing a lot of that disturbance on the left and I wanted to make sure that we didn't end up in amongst that you can see that line running across from left to right from the rocks that are sticking out at the end so we had a plan of where to enter the rapids and the aim was to exit to the right of that disturbance but I'll say from the start we got this slightly wrong we should have entered a little bit more to the right and not because of this section but in the middle the water sloughs from right to left here you can see a shifting to the left pushing us towards where we didn't want to be so now we're having to fight to get up across to the right and we hit some slow water with the front and it's nearly disaster good leaning from myself and Amanda running out the bottom of the rapids backwards rather than forwards and then turning and keeping ourselves to the right of that wave train so not quite the move we wanted to make but the line we wanted in the end but with a little pirouette in the middle quite a strong recirculation on this disparate mind all right okay let's turn before we get swept back into that but we weren't quite in the clear yet the eddy we were in was recirculating towards the top and back it towards the rapids quite strongly and also the run out from the rapids was very very turbulent and we needed to be careful with water going one way and then the other that we didn't end up tipping inadvertently

less watering than the last one he's pushing on to the left side a little bit but not strongly so if we go right the center allow it to take his left a bit and then straight now big Parisian Rapids the Rapids where we had our little pirouette is at the left-hand side of this bottom left-hand corner at the moment and we were running into a section where the river divides into multiple channels and we were taking the left hand most channel which runs through a constriction called bevel chute and then you run into the bottom of little Parisian rapid and then it opens out into a more Lake like stretch for a couple of kilometers and this is the section that we were now going into beautiful section still [Music]

yeah it's the jackets the depth of water the guzzle yeah and it's bouncing around and spinning up and down the Sun was getting somewhat lower now and giving a lovely golden light on the trees and the rocks it really was showing this environment off to its best advantage

it was warm for the time of year the water levels were really good and we were thoroughly enjoying this run through the five mile Rapids section of the French River and as we came down to the bottom of little Parisian we had almost finished this classic section of Rapids here we're going into a more lake like a section for about 1,500 meters and then we would be dropping down to the last set of Rapids we needed to negotiate today which would be crooked Rapids but we were savoring the time on this water we were savoring the peace and quiet being the only boat in sight and looking forward to our camp in the evening and starting to think ahead about where we might want to camp I was having a look at the map as we cross this relatively flat and straight forward section of water a little while later we came to the point where the river flowed out through a constriction again and it was a little hard to see where it was going because of the sunlight and the glare off the water despite wearing sunglasses which are of course always important again in places the water is doing interesting things with boils and Eddie's and little whirlpools actually around that bend sounds like there's so many more around there right we're gonna have to work hard to get across that at this point I couldn't quite see where the water was actually flowing to whether it was going off round to the left or whether it was going straight on figured it was going around to the left and that we would need to land on the right and the main rapids that we would be approaching were over the rise that was in front of us but it took just a little bit of figuring out particularly with the sunshine in our eyes a good amount of the time this was crooked Rapids the last piece of water we're going to have to negotiate today and indeed the last piece of moving water would see for about a day and a half it's very flat after this this again splits into two as some of the rapids here do and rejoins itself at the bottom we could see that there was some interesting flows and boils both at the top and the bottom and that there was some rocks in shallower water to the left-hand side that we wanted to avoid but it looked fairly straightforward even though it was called crooked Rapids you can see because of the shape once we had eyes on it it was going to be relatively straight forward we thought we were always going to take care particularly at this stage of the day [Music]

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once we hit this river water will go that's just mean [Music]

hard to keep track of where you are since we made the most of the calm conditions and stopped not that long before sundown getting a fire going which wasn't difficult in these conditions getting some water boiled before starting to cook had been a good half days paddle from where we started in Woolsey Bay down to here and it was a joy to be here and to have the fire despite the fact the hot weather meant we certainly didn't need it for personal warmth and so ended a great day on a fantastic stretch of the French River and this is why I love this form of travel staying in wonderful places like this

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